At Postgres Vision, EnterpriseDB^® (EDB™), the Postgres database platform company, today announced the general availability of EDB Ark™, a Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) for hybrid cloud deployments of Postgres to private and public clouds such as Red Hat^® OpenStack^®, Amazon Web Services™ (AWS), and other deployment platforms. In addition, EDB Ark will integrate with the leading cloud-native platform, Pivotal Cloud Foundry^®.
“EDB Ark gives IT flexibility without giving up control,” said Marc Linster, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Product Development, EnterpriseDB. “With EDB Ark, IT management can provide a DBaaS for developers or database administrators that runs in hybrid environments. Launching EDB Ark for OpenStack, Amazon, and other platforms gives organizations the ability to quickly deploy instances of Postgres, so they can more effectively support DevOps and continuous application development goals.”
“Modern cloud-native applications require scalable, easy-to-access, on-demand data services with the same high availability and resiliency expected from traditional big iron solutions,” said Joshua McKenty, head of Global Ecosystem Engineering at Pivotal. “EnterpriseDB’s EDB Ark puts powerful enterprise-grade PostgreSQL in the hands of developers building the next generation of web, mobile, and IOT applications.”
“Data platforms need to be built for the cloud with open innovation in order to deliver the responsiveness, agility, and scalability demanded by today’s business applications,” said Doug Balog, General Manager, IBM POWER. “Our investments in the OpenPOWER Foundation, as well as our partnerships with EDB and the Postgres community, highlight our extreme commitment to open source development. As such, POWER8, combined with EDB Ark, provides clients with a cloud solution built on efficient, high-performance, open technologies to deliver leading DBaaS choice.”
According to Gartner, Inc.: “IT departments are besieged by demands that come from two fundamentally different business needs: the need to provide stable and reliable performance to address the daily business functioning of the enterprise; and the need for flexibility and responsiveness to deliver digitally innovative results that drive new business outcomes…. To meet the challenge, Gartner recommends that CIOs adopt a bimodal approach that identifies a Mode 1 capability that is applied to situations that are more predictable, and focused on improving and renovating in more well-understood areas, and a Mode 2 capability that is exploratory, experimenting to solve new problems.”^[1]
EDB Ark Architecture
EDB Ark simplifies the process of provisioning robust Postgres deployments, while taking advantage of the benefits of cloud computing. When used with EDB Postgres Advanced Server, EDB Ark also provides compatibility with Oracle^®, offering dramatic cost savings and competitive advantages.
The EDB Ark console and APIs allow for quick and easy creation of Postgres clusters – each cluster is immediately set up with high availability, automatic backup and recovery, load balancing, and basic monitoring and management. Users have the option of encrypting every cluster to provide an environment that is both secure and transparent to the connecting applications.
EDB Ark Features and Functionality
EDB Ark gives IT managers the ideal combination of deployment flexibility with centralized control and monitoring, while providing developers point-and-click simplicity, flexibility, and speed.
Database administrators (DBAs) can work with EDB Ark through the GUI or a RESTful API. Applications connect to Postgres clusters through pgPool; if preferred, they can also connect directly to databases within the clusters. DBAs have full access to the databases via SSH.
EDB Ark provides a unified interface to control and manage deployments from an easy-to-use management console, as well as an API. EDB Ark deployments provide high availability, integrated disaster recovery, cross availability zone replication, and self-healing capabilities.
Additional key features and functionality of EDB Ark include:
Scale out and scale up: EDB Ark provides scale out for increased read performance and increased data storage, and scale up to increase RAM or CPU. Scaling thresholds for the number of server connections or the percentage of storage can be used to add new replicas to the cluster automatically or increase the storage assigned to the cluster. The User Interface (UI) allows for simple upscaling (or downscaling) of the machine types to change RAM or CPU as needed.
Migration and Compatibility with Oracle: EDB Ark offers full support for EDB Postgres Advanced Server, thus combining the flexibility of a DBaaS framework with database compatibility for Oracle. EDB Postgres Advanced Server’s database compatibility for Oracle includes:

• SPL – EDB’s stored procedure language that natively executes Oracle’s PL/SQL
• APIs supporting key Oracle interfaces including the Oracle Call Interface (OCI) and Pro*C
• Function packages covering the most popular Oracle packages used by developers
• DBA tools that make it easy to migrate established work processes and skill sets to EDB Postgres Advanced Server
• A migration toolkit that automatically migrates Oracle objects including schema, data, stored procedures, packages and user definitions to EDB Postgres Advanced Server

Replication: To extend capabilities, EDB Ark clusters can also be used in conjunction with EDB Postgres Replication Server. This allows for the creation of fully integrated digital business solutions that bridge traditional on-premises databases running on SQL Server or Oracle Database to DBaaS solutions running on Postgres. An order status website, for example, could run in the DBaaS framework while the order management system remains untouched as a legacy database on-premises, with continuous data replication to Postgres.
The EDB Postgres Replication Server supports continuous replication of data from the traditional on-premises systems to the DBaaS databases – a key capability needed to avoid data silos.
EDB Postgres Replication Server also can be used with EDB Ark to minimize downtime for migrations from traditional database platforms such as Oracle or SQL Server to Postgres-based DBaaS-managed databases. First, the EDB Postgres Migration Toolkit is used for a one-time migration of the database. Then EDB Postgres Replication Server is used to bring the DBaaS-managed database instance up-to-date with the original database, before redirecting the application to the DBaaS-managed instance. This approach combines the migration functionality with the continuous data replication capabilities to allow users to migrate to open source-based solutions with minimal downtime.